Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about the art of speaking, how to market your business from a stage. Neil, how long have you been speaking for?

Neil Patel: Over 10 years.

Eric Siu: And how did you start initially because you weren't good in the beginning right?

Neil Patel: I just kept speaking and then you naturally get good at it.

Eric Siu: Did you join Toastmasters or anything?

Neil Patel: I didn't join Toastmasters. I naturally have a personality where I'm not that shy so I just go and talk and I'm big on when people speak, and I made this mistake when I did my first speech, I created all my presentations, I rehearsed what I was going to say slide by slide and then I went and I spoke on stage. When I did that people felt like I sounded like a robot. Nowadays I put the notes, or I more so create my slides and I don't rehearse what I'm going to say per slide. Heck, I don't even rehearse at all. Because I made my deck, I know the topic that I'm going to be speaking on and then I just go and talk and have a conversation.

Eric Siu: Right. I think Neil and I often are in the same boat here. We think about what is a story first of all. What are you trying to convey. And also what I make sure I ask the organizers is who's in the audience and what is a home run to them and then I tailor to talk that way. Because sometimes lets say I'm speaking back to back at different kind of events. I might be using the same presentation but I'm talking to them differently and I'm also at the same time, sometimes I might just stop and sometimes I might engage with people midway.
I don't do that a lot but my point of saying that is there's different ways to present to different audiences so you have to know who you're talking to and what I've seen, this is the same thing for Neil, he presented last week, is when he throws something out it's not just a bunch of bullet points, it's actually, it's literally just one point perhaps and it's one image and he's talking through the image instead of just reading through slides. Anyone can read through the slides. At that point you're no longer talking to the audience, you're just kind of regurgitating what's already there, and at that point there's not point of you even being on the stage. Right Neil?

Neil Patel: That's correct. And what's funny is, Eric and I, we sell on stage by educating so we'll teach people, help them solve their problems. We may mention our company but we don't do a hard sell. I've never seen you do a hard sell and I haven't either and it works well for us but you have to find what's right for you. If you look at people who generate the most revenue from speaking, funny enough it's not Eric and I. Even if you put us in the largest crowds. People like Russel Brunson still generate more revenue speaking on stage because he sells his business. And you can take a page out of his playbook. It doesn't fit Eric and I and our personality and our brand but his model is, when he speaks on stage he'll always speak about his product and he offers something that's a special price for the product he's selling and that gets a ton of people rushing in to buy his product.

Eric Siu: We were talking about this recently but he spoke at Grant Cardone's 10X conference. How much revenue did he do?

Neil Patel: I believe it was three million bucks.

Eric Siu: Three million bucks. He has a total framework, he's been doing this for years, where he'll educate you and the at a certain point he'll start throwing the offer at you. You start to feel like there's a FOMO aspect where there's a fear of missing out if you don't buy and then what he does is he sets tables up in the back and people start running to the back like this deal's going to go away soon and all that. Again, like Neil, if you look at Neil's content, if you look at our content, my content, we're just constantly educating, we're being relentless, education just keeps coming over time. And a lot of the conferences we speak at, they don't actually allow us to sell right?

Neil Patel: They don't. And the ones that do want you to sell, like at Grant Cardone's 10X event, they want speakers to sell so when Russell does three million dollars, Grant may end up keeping 1.5 million of if because he threw the event, he got the attendees and he charges the speakers 50% of the revenue or something around there. My percentages can be a little bit off. But most of these guys take 50% of the revenue. And at these events, people are expecting to be sold and most conferences people aren't really expecting to be sold.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and I was just talking about this recently with a friend and he mentioned how he was going to go speak at a conference. Well known guy in the internet marketing space. And what he found was he was ambushed. Everyone was selling on stage. The audience was not happy about all the people that were just selling because they paid to be there. They're spending their time there and everyone ... It's a pitch fest. He actually reluctantly backed out at the last minute. Said, "Hey, I can't put my brand in front of this." We're not saying there's something completely wrong with that, it just rubs people the wrong way sometimes, a certain class of people.
What I can say, when you are trying to do something, if you want to collect emails for examples, you can Leadpages Leaddigits and from there you might say, "Well, I have this really in depth research for you to check out," and you can just put in Marketing 23344, just text it, and then you'll get an email. That way you collect email addresses. That's one way that I've done it in the past but I haven't directly sold ever and neither has Neil.

Neil Patel: The easiest way to collect leads when you're speaking and selling on stages, just telling people, do you want the deck? Here's the URL. And when they go to the URL either you show the deck or you ask them for their name, email, company size, all their information and then allow them to see the deck. That's the easiest way to collect leads. Or as Eric mentioned, you're doing some sort of special offer. You can sell on stage. I don't like it. It rubs people the wrong way. And the real truth is if you really want to grow your business look at Gary Vaynerchuk.
He's created an empire that generates over a hundred million in yearly revenue. He speaks a lot. That's how he gets a lot of his business. I think Eric was mentioning to me the other day that he's getting closer and closer to two hundred million. And the way Gary sells is, he just goes and he helps people and educates. We believe in the same thing. We believe yes, in the short run it may not make you the most money but in the long run it builds loyalty and that in turn will make you more money.

Eric Siu: Yeah, people can sense it when you're trying to optimize for every single dollar so when you play the long game ... Gary actually made a video recently about why he gives mostly all the stuff away for free and he really doesn't make that much off of books. It's because long game, when he has all the attention, well then he can decide to do whatever he wants. He can just keep deferring, deferring, deferring and well, when you look at all the stars out there you can choose different ways to monetize, different creative ways, and you bring different opportunities. Like Neil said, sometimes selling on stage can rub people the wrong way and it's just not our style. You might defer from that. But anyway, before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get marketing tools to grow your business and we'll see you tomorrow.

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